Cultivating Design Competence: Online Support for the Beginning Design Studio

A primary lesson of a beginning design studio is the development of a fundamental design competence. This entails acquiring skills of integration, projection, exploration, as well as critical thinking–forming the basis of thinking “like a designer.” Plaguing the beginning architectural design student as she develops this competence are three typical problems: a lagging visual intelligence, a linking of originality with creativity, and the belief that design is an act of an individual author instead of a collaborative activity. We believe that computation support for design learning has particular attributes for helping students overcome these problems. These attributes include its inherent qualities for visualization, for explicitness, and for sharing. This paper describes five interactive multi-media exercises exploiting these attributes which were developed to support a beginning design studio. The paper also reports how they have been integrated into the course curriculum.